A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left.
Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Anti-Labour Home

Labourhome is rapidly developing a reputation for being completely unhelpful to the Party whose name it uses.

Today, they they publish a set of survey results the only utility of which can be to damage individual ministers and the the Party the day before the start of a crucial party conference.

The survey had a self-selecting set of participants, so there is no way of finding out if it is in any way representative.

What's more it was conducted deceitfully, with no effort being made to inform participants that the survey had been commissioned by a newspaper.

Alex, Jag, you could not have been more unhelpful if you had tried. Try switching on your brains and thinking strategically about the future of the party before initiating these sort of publicity stunts.

68 Comments:

Your complaints about the statistical base are wrong. If this is a survey of Labour supporters, then with a base of 700 replies it will be representative of those supporters who have the acess and time to surf the net.

More inportantly, this death wish of the Brown supporters to hide bad news and pretend that it does not exist does not do the party any favours.

For the sake of the party, and the country, Brown must go and fast, before any further damage is done.

It won't be representative because in my local experience in Hackney only 5% of Labour activists read blogs, and my wider guess is that people who support the leadership tend not to read LabourHome because it publishes crap like this.

Labour Home is a load of rubbish. I was banned from labour home for being too pro the PM, while they allow tonnes of tory trolls on who do nothing but insult the labour party. And di not mean from the left I mean from the old tory right.It is silly daily mail style survey with no real analysis to it. What I find odd is that the independent treat it as seriously as a you gov or mori survey. Lbaour Home are not a labour activists website. Mr Hilton has even been in business with that the right wing maniac Paul Staines, and has defended him. Hilton registered the Taken from wikipedia. "www.Messagespace.co.uk domain. Messagespace, a joint venture with Jag Singh and right-wing blogger Paul Staines went live on August 7 2006"

Alex Hilton has his own agenda in my view. Why does he do this stupid survey right before the conference? Why does he advertise this survey as a serious survey and not as the daily mail level survey it is.

Luke, you seem to be of the opinion that Labour Party members should be the only people who are not allowed to express views on the leadership.

It was not conducted deceitfully at all. You know full well that you don't provide information in advance of a survey that might skew the results. The Indy link was not financial, merely an agreement in terms of getting publicity for the site, which is perfectly reasonable. You publicise your site as do I. This agreement was made before we knew what the results were.

If 80% of Labour members had backed Gordon, would you be knocking my freedom to conduct a survey? What you're saying is that I should only publish material that is of benefit to the individuals in the Party that you decree should benefit in that regard and I suspect you would be far less fussy if I were criticising David Cairns.

The Tories are at 52%. It would be astonishing if Labour members were satisfied.

Guido Fawkes and Alex Hilton are in union together they run message space the stupid advertising company, so ofcourse Guidio Fawkes will stand up for his business buddy. We have every right to shoot the messenger if he is putting the part down deliberatelyt. Have you not seen the movie 300. See this move clip to see why it is OK to shoot the messenger. What the labour party should say to Labour Home

I own 10% of Messagespace and have no day-to-day involvement in the running of the company.

Paul Staines, despite being an absolute pain in some matters is indeed a friend and I don't go around pretending this is not the case.

Dirty Euro, last time you suggested you were banned from Labourhome for being pro-PM I told you to get in touch with me and I would restore your rights. Because no-one has been banned for being pro-PM. People have only been banned for being abusive on the site.

I didn't poll a councillors specifically, which is how I would explain the discrpancy, though my mailing list does include about 5,000 current and former Labour Councillors whose email addresses are in the public domain.

All opinion polls are self selecting unless you force people to answer them.

If your response, Luke, is to rubbish the poll as conducted with a lack of diligence, then all I can say is that I did my best and that was good enough for NOP when I worked for them.

If your response is to rubbish me personally, then I would be disappointed because I have always held you in very high regard.

I was not abusive on labour home. OK I went over the top in supporting the leader of the party to make up the for criticism he got on your website, I just did it to wind up all the tory trolls on your website, but with no abuisive messages. I assure you I did not swear and in fact what annoyed me was that people who were abusive to me did not seem to have been banned. It is just like any other major comment blog tory internet brigdaes take over. Are you aware of internet and web brigades Tories run these. So how can seriously claim your survey was not corrupted. How what evidence do you have for this? How would you stop this?It is not true that every opinion survey is self selecting. The companies analyse and weight for a fair representation.

Labour supporters have right to be angry with you doing this survey a week before conference. And we have a right to question your loyalty to the party when you have such an insanely timed survey. Why was Guido fawkes an enemy of the party so cock a hoop about this survey? Why can you just not admit what your agenda is. Why did the independent not point out this survey is not genuinaly fair survey. It was very capable for being corrupted by tory internet brigades, and does not tie in with other surveys.

Anyone with half a brain cell knows this survey has the credibilty of a daily mail phone in vote on immigration. And you should make that point clear. Instead you acgt like it has the credibility of a mori survey. Why don't you. That is what makes the survey even more painful to take the underdesrved credibilty it has been given by you and the independent.

Well, I'm rubbishing Alex. I think when you make an error of judgement like this you have to face the music on it.

However, I think I ought to make it clear, that the offer of a drink for people who punch Alex was a joke. I am not seriously advocating violence against Alex (or anyone else) at Party conference. In general I think Labour Home is a great website which makes a positive contribution to this great movement of hours, but the monthly activist survey is a serious blemish, and the tie in with the indy makes a bad idea 100 times worse....

I took part in the poll as a labour party supporter of 45 years (lapsed member). I was one of the participants who called for a change of leadership - have done for the past 7 months and will continue to do so. I have witnessed many political leaders and feel I have a right to state my view if I feel someone is not up to the job.

The questions asked in the poll were unambiguous. I am unconcerned about whether the poll was commissioned by the Independent or any other news media as I freely participated. If the surver had attracted financial reward then I feel I should have been informed of that fact. It did not so I do not consider that the survey was deceitful. I am a member of You Gov and regularly participate in various other polls on political sites. I always contribute to Iain Dale's polls. I very much enjoy his blog despite political differences. Do you consider me a traitor(liking Iain Dale) as well as an unhelpful supporter (liking Labour Home)?

Unlike you, I enjoy much of the debate on Labour Home. I am surprised that you feel that a critical analyis of what is happening in the party is unhelpful. I think it is right and proper to use all forums for a debate given the abysmal performance of the current leadership. A reminder that the survey was not only for activists but Labour Party supporters so I do not understand why you mentioned only 5% of activists reading blogs.

I do not live in London and I can assure you that the leadership of the Labour Party and performance of the PM is the topic of conversation over dinner tables. Labour Home therefore seems to be more in touch with the public un like other Labour Sites which fail to raise many issues of concern.

I didn't know whether the respondents of the poll would back gordon or not when I launched the poll. I didn't choose how people would answer.

Foot, Kinnock, Smith, Beckett, Blair and Brown. These are the leaders I remember and they come and go and the bring their talents and their baggage with them.

I think having a lively and productive online community will be of benefit to the Labour Party in future elections, regardless of who the leader is. We will never have a lively online community when Labour supporters feel inhibited from expressing their views.

People's expectations of the quality of engagement is increasing rapidly and any political party that seeks to inhibit engagement will find itself marginalised.

So yes I promote Labourhome wherever possible. because it's not perfect and it's not yet ubiquitous, but its doing a job that the Labour Party refuses to do.

Luke - you are completely right. Gordon Brown is doing an absolutely fantastic job and is rightly held in the highest esteem as the most popular politician the world has ever seen. He is clearly on course to win the next election with a landslide. Every poll conducted to date confidently predicts that the tories will be wiped out across the board and will lose their deposits in every constituency. Gordon's triumphant and hugely successful Labour government will win 97% of the popular vote (it would have been a clean 100% but for the well-known rightwing conspiracy against him) and take every seat in the House of Commons, which will be renamed the House of Gordon in his honour.

It is quite astonishing, indeed bizarre, that Labour Home should publish this disloyal so-called poll which they know to be totally fabricated and a tissue of lies. Surely there is a law against publishing this sort of "opinion". This is exactly what the anti-terrorism legislation was designed to stop.

Clearly Alex Hilton has been abducted by rightwing aliens and reprogrammed as an evil baby-eating tory troll with a pointy tail and everything.

Chances are you were banned from LH for the same reason you've been banned from the Telegraph, from Dale, etc - because you're a bloody pillock. Excuse my language on your blog, Luke, but this twerp has naff all to add to any debate. Little Sir Echo with an IQ bypass.

That poll was not scientific - I'm a Tory and I voted in it, as mischievously as possible.

Labour's problem is in some ways an honourable one. You as a party have repeatedly stuck business with measures that make it costly and difficult to get rid of useless employees. You face a similar problem getting rid of an obviously incompetent PM, because you've had the integrity to inflict the same problem on yourselves. It's hard to remove the clot and because he's psychologically flawed he can't see any reason why he should go.

Interesting, isn't it, that it would take 30-odd Labour rebels MPS to force a general election but you need 70 to force a leadership election?

"I didn't know whether the respondents of the poll would back gordon or not when I launched the poll. I didn't choose how people would answer."

That suggests to me you didn't have much clue about your audience, which clearly included mischevious Tories, people with internet access and time who may not all be representative of Labour's core vote, and is more likely to include people who wanted to make their point about the leadership than people who are tired of all this speculation and don't want to take part in it.

I think it is perfectly fair to question how scientific this poll of Labour members / supporters is.

However I also think it is clear that Gordon Brown's leadership is deeply unpopular among the remaining rump of the Labour party and among traditional supporters. We only have to look at Glasgow East, local elections or opinion polls to work that out.

I don't think that there is anyone out there who seriously believes that Labour under Gordon Brown has even the slightest chance of winning the next election. However, there is no point removing him if he is replaced with someone committed to the exact same unpopular political agenda. If there is to be a leadership election, it needs to be about policies rather than personalities.

The idea of a Tory landslide is frankly absolutely terrifying and sycophantically attaching ourselves to one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers in modern times is not going to help us stave off that threat.

The greatest service LabourHome does to the Tories is in the tone of the "debate".

The stalwarts of the site are in the main spotty youths who've never paid a tax in their lives, or Dave Sparts who've stepped right out of the 70s, or hairy-legged feminists who make Hattie Harperson look balanced and pleasant.

The typical post is not a post at all, but a bilious rant. They hate other leftist factions more than they hate the Tories, and they take offence at others posters' remarks faster than a Geordie who thinks you spilt his pint.

When Tories do get onto that site and make points the site's pondlife can't refute, they explode with rage, hate, abuse, and bile.

I have seen Tories twit them gently about some grotesque Labour betrayal - killing children in Iraq, or stealth-taxing the poor, or whatever - and the regulars all huffily declare that they pesonally didn't agree with any of that. Oh, right, so that's neutralised the point for the Tories then! Not!

A few months back, there was a thread about commemorating the mines' strike which triggered such an embarrassing orgy of leftist hate that Alex had to take it down. I expect that happens quite a lot. They are absolutely not remotely interested in alternative views, nor in defending their own. They just want all dissent silenced, and they'll shout it down if they can't get those views banned from the site. The government of course behaves in exactly the same way.

If Alex wants his site to be helpful to Labour, his best bet is to suspend all comments, because quite frankly, the evil that oozes out of the screen when I hit that site is tangible.

Kinnock was the first Labouroid to grasp that the only way for Labour to get elected is to hide what it actually is. Blair took it to extremes, but unfortunately for Labour the power of the internet is rapidly unravelling decades of diligent Labour maskhirovka.

A few months back, there was a thread about commemorating the mines' strike which triggered such an embarrassing orgy of leftist hate that Alex had to take it down.

Slightly disingenous. Without wanting to reopen a rather unpleasant debate, if it was taken down it was likely because some Tory troll was justifying the killings of pickets David Jones and Joe Green. An emotive subject for many.

Once again the talking bogie at 1:52 pm made up a comment for me. The guy is right though he is a creep. It seems to be the moron who calls himself a talking bogie, an apt name. He then has a long rant about the iraq war which the tories supported he has another tedious rant about the labour party being too scared to hold an election because we'd lose. Wow what brilliant analysis how did he work that one out. By the way the reason Iain dale banned me was because I insulted someone who insulted me. I have not been banned from the telegraph and i got banned by Guido fawkes cos he bans all left wing people if you win thre argument. I don't really think Guido fawkes bans people for being rude now does he. Since when did that start happeing. Guido the most foul mouthed blogger on the internet banning people for swearing Do you actualy believe the drivel you spew out. He bannedme because my arguments beat his.

Labour are going down with whoever at the helm, really, so you need to work in that context and stop wetting yourselves. Stop using the media as a means to do people's dirty work, keep it clean and seen on the inside - have you not learnt anything from British political history - especially at economic meltdown points!!!!

I went over to Guido fawkes blog for the first time in months it is just gay black porn. A picture of a black man taking his underpants off. On that excuse that the picture was taken at a fashion show and the PM wife was watching the show. Guidos website fans must like gay black porn. LOL LOL LOL Any ecuse eh! Do not look at his blog. He must have a stackload of pics of black men taking their underpants off. LOL. Oh well with that police order he must find some new stuff to do LOL.

Further thought, DES: you might enjoy the "Girl with a one-track mind" blog more than the politics ones. It's the sexual adventures of a thick promiscuous posh bird who likes grunting lefties. You'd fit right in.

"The Party". Does everybody have to eject brain before joining a political party and Slavishly follow the thoughts of the chairman, or are we allowed to think and speak for ourselves in what we believe to be correct. Why on earth should anyone be arsed to comply with something which has changed very much for the worse. Why should we watch while a leader, clearly unhinged, is systematically destroying everything we have all worked for. I for one will not be silenced by a bunch of lemmings racing for the edge of a cliff without a hope of rescue.

Back to the matter at hand; while this poll (or indeed any recent one) might not be helpful to the Labour Party I'm getting pretty fed up hearing why they shouldn't be published.

Labour/Brown ran away from holding the 'ultimate test' of public opinion last year and now it sounds like they don't wish to allow ANY voicing of opinion (whether from party loyalists or the wider public).

The country is crying out for a change and yet Labour refuses to grant the change we desire most of all. Worse, those who could (or should for the country's greater good) add their voices instead devote their energies to quelling unrest. Shame on you.

Mark my words, the public is noticing your ever tightening grasp on power. The day will come when they will break your fingers to take it back.

"Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist," he says. "The government is found wanting. So for someone to come along and say, 'We'll show you how to do good PR' is disgraceful.

"Where will people draw the line? Would Weber Shandwick want to see the swastikas before deciding not to work with someone?"

Weber Shandwick replies that it has "been hired by the democratically elected Colombian government to advise on a range of issues" - "mainly... [seeking] to promote dialogue, ideas and experience of how best to combat cocaine production, trafficking and abuse".

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About Me

Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.